All you need is 1,000 people paying you $10/mo, and you’ll make $10,000 per month.
Is it possible? Sure. But the reality is bleak.
Let me be clear about who this is and isn’t for.
If you’re here to write for fun and make some fun money, click away.
This is only for solopreneurs — consultants, coaches, practitioners, experts — who want to build profitable businesses from their words.
The headline is about paid subscribers, but paid subscribers are just one example of a strategy that fails for 99 percent of people who try it — the ‘passive’ income model.
You want passive income. A paid tier with an ecosystem of digital products like e-books, downloads, and mini courses.
You figure it’ll all add up in the long run.
Here’s what’s likely to happen.
You’ll wake up a year from now with a couple of dozen paid subs and a handful of sales of your digital products and e-books.
You’ll start thinking to yourself:
“I should be making more. Why aren’t more people buying my e-books? Why aren’t the course sales rolling in?”
You’ll have a growing audience, but most of your audience won’t buy from you. And you’ll be working harder than ever — hosting lives, creating deep-dive guides for your paid tier, and constantly posting content to grow an audience who will continue not to buy from you.
There are a couple of different reasons why this model doesn’t work for 99 percent of solopreneurs.
You want 1,000 subscribers paying you $10/mo to make $10,000 per month.
Assume you can convert 5% of your free subs into paid subs.
That means that at $10/mo with 1,000 paid subs to hit $10,000 per month, you’d need 20,000 subscribers to hit that mark.
But 5% assumes you engineered your Substack to convert from day one.
I’m a marketer, so I know what the pros do.
Everything is set up before they turn on that button:
They have multiple deep-dive guides paywalled and ready to go
They have old course materials to add to their tier
They have a start here page set up with an upsell ready to go
They have copywriting bullets on each post to tease you into going paid
They have engineered launch posts to announce monetization from day one
Most of you won’t be in that position, so even if you do grow, you’ll probably convert at 3% or less, which means you will need . . . 33,000 subscribers just to hit $10K/mo.
Now let’s look at why most people struggle to sell any low-ticket products in general.
We are down to 2 spots for the August growth squad, where we’ll help a small handful of experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months by building a business model that requires zero paid subscribers.
The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below.
We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.
If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.
Book Your $10K roadmap call here
(Don’t book the call if you have zero clue what you’d sell, have zero experience, or have zero audience or network to reach out to. This is not for complete beginners.)
An old coach of mine was running a campaign for a $27 workshop this month. The campaign for this workshop probably lasted about two weeks in total.
He sent an email every day. Sometimes twice a day. He was running ads on IG. On the last day before the workshop went live, he sent five or six emails.
Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Sounds annoying and aggressive, doesn’t it?
I ended up buying it. But I had to see it a bunch of times before I did.
One time I saw an email and didn’t have my card on me.
Another time, I did have my card on me, but it was rejecting the payment, so I just decided to do it later.
I had the money, but part of me was like, “agh, do I really have the time for this, or is it going to just sit on my shelf?”
Sending many emails in your campaigns helps mostly because people are busy.
So the first hurdle you have to cross is the volume problem — building a big enough audience to make the low-ticket math work.
Then you have to solve the frequency problem — promoting yourself often enough to get people to buy.
Let’s bring back the conversion math here.
Say you have even just a $100 product. To make $10,000 in a month, you have to sell 100 copies of that $100 product. Not just one month, but every single month.
Typical conversion rates for email lists for a product at that price point? 1-2%.
I checked the numbers of a big creator’s launch for a $97 product the other month, and it converted at about 1%.
Let’s say you bump it up to 3% to be generous, then you’re looking at a 3,300-person list. And you will not convert at 3% unless you do a legitimate launch for that low-ticket product.
It’s anything but simple, easy, or passive. You have to convince many different people to buy, multiple times, repeatedly, stretched across long durations.
Marketing tactical hell is what happens when you have a dozen different mediocre strategies running at one time, and you don’t know what to do to fix the problem.
You will be quite active — doing all of the things — and it won’t add up.
You’ll spend Saturday mornings hosting an hour-long live for your paid subscribers that you promised as part of your tier, but only 3 of your 24 show up, and so now you’re essentially doing 1-on-1 coaching for $30.
You spend months writing that e-book, pour your heart and soul into it, only to get 14 sales.
You’re on the content treadmill, creating all of these deep-dive guides you promised as part of your tier.
You’ll keep up with your cadence of writing 4 notes per day and 1-2 articles per week.
Your audience will grow, but it won’t solve your monetization problem. The likes and the comments used to be fun, but after a while you can start to resent an audience that pats you on the back, showers your praises, but doesn’t open their wallets.
You’ll start thinking you’re the problem. You’ll wonder why you can’t figure it out.
You started your newsletter business for freedom, but you realize all this passive income stuff actually . . . takes a lot of work . . . and you’re not even getting paid what you’re worth.
Now you’re just confused.
What should you shut down? What should you double down on? Which product is the winner?
Is the answer more followers? A new platform? A different structure for your paid tier? Which aspect of the paid tier should you change? The price? The features?
You go in loops and loops, not wanting to keep wasting time on strategies that aren’t working, but then not risking time trying something new that won’t work.
What advice will you get? Just keep posting! Hang in there!!!
I’ve seen this model kill people’s careers who otherwise would have succeeded, and it makes me sad.
None of this is your fault.
You are a practitioner, a coach, a consultant, an expert in your field who wants to express yourself and build a business with your words.
But you were given a model built by content creators and marketers for content creators and marketers.
You need a strategy that’s built for you.
You can turn this around and turn that same audience into a six-figure business if you use a model that’s built for coaches, consultants, and experts.
.
Brian Clark — founder of an eight-figure online education company for creators and solopreneurs — said this about the passive first model:
Couldn’t have said it better myself. I arrived at the same conclusion and modeled my strategy the same way he’s talking about in his note.
I call this method the Reverse Pyramid Business Model. I got the name from a bodybuilding program.
I learned this concept called reverse pyramid training that helps you build muscle faster — you start your sets with the heaviest weight.
You have the most energy, which means you can get bigger gains because you can do more reps at the weight that causes the most muscle growth.
I applied this same logic to business.
Let's get you cash and confidence upfront so you have the strength to build your empire for the long-term.
Then, with a healthy bank account, client results, and proven frameworks to use, you’ll be able to build your scalable empire.
Some of you might be wondering:
“If my low-ticket products and paid tier aren’t selling that well, why would people buy something more expensive?”
Low-ticket products — ebooks and courses — require more effort and sacrifice to accomplish the result, so people value them less.
Coaching increases their odds of success and requires less effort and sacrifice on their part to get the result.
You provide guidance that information alone can’t provide — judgment, nuance, speed, structure, curated information sequenced for your clients.
This doesn’t even require Zoom calls. I’d suggest it, but I’ve met coaches and consultants who sell and deliver four to five packages strictly via text.
With this model, you can sign clients each month without having to do complex marketing campaigns.
The process is dead simple:
Write notes and articles
Add calls to action to book calls to work with you
Send a couple of messages each day to people in your audience to connect and convert
I break down what that model looks like in a bit more depth here:
Selling courses at scale is great for the course creator, but bad for customers. The course creator gets paid, but 97% of the customers don’t even finish their course.
1-on-1 coaching is great for clients but bad for the coach long-term. The clients win, but the coach starts to drown in customized game plans, and their income hits a cap.
Coaching at scale is great for both the coach and the clients.
Clients get access to you for nuanced feedback through a game plan call, weekly calls, and your portal to help them implement.
You can give them some 1-on-1 access for game planning, but the rest can be handled in the group format.
Since you’ve worked with many clients, you can turn your insights into structured roadmaps and frameworks that you’ve tested, so they can get results without your time because the framework does the heavy lifting.
The best part about building a program like this? It’s assembled instead of created.
You won’t have to guess at the curriculum, you’ll just take the patterns of 1-on-1 clients who already paid you and turn them into the course structure.
You’ll create little assets for your 1-on-1 clients on an as-needed basis that will become part of your group offering
You will still have to put time into working with a client roster. It’s not passive. But it’s scalable.
When I work with clients, we take the same offer that we were selling 1-on-1 and switch it to group without lowering the price.
They’re selling $3,000-$5,000+ group programs and managing dozens of clients in 4-6 hours per day.
Loggers realized that after cutting wood, they can sell the sawdust it created.
You can sell your sawdust, too, by breaking off chunks from the stuff you’ve already built for clients.
You can take your curriculum, slides, and transcripts and turn them into custom GPTs, AI agents, and tools.
You can host a workshop that you were already going to do for clients and charge the public for access.
You have a handful of lessons or workshops built, and then you sell them up and bundle them as a course.
You know people will want to buy them because you built them at the request of people who already bought from you.
This helps you avoid having to come up with a curriculum, a bunch of slides, and a fancy sales page all before someone has paid you $1.
In the future, once you do have a big audience and all of your systems are dialed in . . .
You can make things ridiculously more passive because you’ll have the traffic, all of your ideas are vetted, and you’ll have an ecosystem that has evolved.
Your odds of getting the passive empire results are HIGHER with this model.
I built this model because I’ve met so many people who struggled and felt burnt out by the passive model.
I’ve seen people put months into writing an e-book that sold 3 copies.
I’ve met creators who shot and recorded a dozen videos and put together a course nobody bought.
I’ve met writers with big audiences who struggle to monetize them.
My model isn’t sexy, but it’s effective.
It takes work . . .
But as you’ve seen here, all of these models take work.
Don’t want to do client work to build your base? Cool. But your alternative isn’t going to be any easier.
The best thing you can do for your business is abandon the idea that you’re going to roll out of bed, write some articles, slap together some products, and get rich.
Besides, I don’t think you want a passive income empire as much as you want autonomy, agency, and something you own.
You want to be known for your knowledge, paid what you’re actually worth, work with clients that energize you, share compelling ideas, and make an impact on this world.
You wouldn’t mind working a full work week on something that belongs to you, so build it. It’ll be worth it.
You’re not meant to sit on the beach and sip pina colodas anyway. You’re meant to put a dent in the universe and get paid to do it.
A smart practitioner like you most likely needs:
A model that doesn’t require you to be a marketing savant to make money online.
A model that isn’t completely passive, but fulfills you because you work with clients that energize you and teach topics that fascinate you
A model that finally gives you something you own so you can have some control of your time in the future and have a real shot at scale.
If this sounds like it might be the right model for you, then here’s the next step.
We are down to 2 spots for the August growth squad where we’ll help a small handful of experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months by building a business model that requires zero paid subscribers.
The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below.
We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.
If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.
Book Your $10K roadmap call here
(Don’t book the call if you have zero clue what you’d sell, have zero experience, or have zero audience or network to reach out to. This is not for complete beginners.)
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